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2015-10-01 06:26:20
Sep 30th 2015, 14:23 by B.R.
THERE was some brief excitement in the aviation world earlier this week, as
rumours swirled about the fall of a dubious industry record. On a trip to
Silicon Vally it was suggested that Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India,
was going to announce the launch of the world s longest non-stop plane route:
an Air India flight between Bangalore and San Francisco, a journey of around
8,700 miles or 18 hours. As it turned out, the route India s flag carrier has
planned is the 7,670-mile journey from New Delhi to San Francisco. That will
last a paltry 16 hours.
For fans of long plane journeys (and who isn't?) it has been a rollercoaster
year. In August, Emirates announced the real deal: a 17-and-a-half-hour,
8,590-mile slog between Dubai and Panama, which will begin flying next
February. That will easily beat Qantas s Flight 8 from Sydney to Dallas, which
is the currently the world s longest non-stop route a journey that takes 17
hours to cover 8,600 miles. But both are some way short of Singapore Airlines
(SIA) Flight 21, a gruelling 19-hour, 9,500-mile affair between Singapore and
Newark, which was the longest recorded non-stop commercial route until it was
discontinued in 2013.
A Singapore-based Gulliver s hopes were raised earlier this year when Goh Choon
Phong, SIA's boss, said he wanted to resume flight 21 as soon as possible .
Those hoped were quickly dashed, though. As we wrote:
Flight 21 took 19 hours to fly more than 9,500 miles: long, but well within
range for the five Airbus A340-500s that plied the route. The problem was the
cost: the A340-500s can cover long distances but the four-engine planes are not
terribly efficient. [...]
But in this context, ASAP does not mean next week, next month or even next
year: Mr Goh said that SIA is talking to Airbus and Boeing about designing a
new aircraft, which takes time. Airbus began designing the A340 family of
aircraft in the mid-1970s; the first A340-500 did not take wing until 2002.
Of course, no one is really a fan of long flights. There is no feeling quite as
disorientating as disembarking after a whopper. That isn t just down to sitting
in cramped conditions breathing recirculated air for hour after hour, or the
disruption to our circadian rhythms. There is also something discombobulating
about boarding a plane in one town and stepping off many thousands of miles
away. In his book Skyfaring , Mark Vanhoenacker, a 747 pilot, described the
feeling as place lag . It results, he says, from the imaginative drag that
results from our jet age displacements over every kind of distance; from the
inability of our deep old sense of place to keep up with our aeroplanes.
The best that can be said for long non-stoppers is that some think them
preferable to adding on time with a layover. Gulliver is not in that camp. I
think of breaking up the journey rather like equalising halfway down on a deep
dive; a chance to re-adjust body and mind, before heading for the murky depths.
But then I am one of those wretches confined to the back of a plane. A left
turn on entering the cabin would no doubt be enough to make me reconsider my
position.